Posted - 2012.06.10 18:00:00 -
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I have been noticing an appalling trend in which highsec miners can afford to fly these behemoths, yet no matter how outraged they get over suicide ganks, they never fit the ships to resist ganks. I hope this post can inform you all a bit better on how to fit best to maximize your defensive potential, as well as explain why I pick the fits I do. If you know someone who has trouble with this, or you see yet another forum post about "nerf suicide gankers", please send them a link to this thread.

Let's get right into this. The fits:HulkMost importantly, fit a damage control module. This jumps your effective hit points up from about 9K to around 13-14K (depending on the meta level of the damage control).Next, fit a shield tank:

Basic Hardener Fit You can fit an EM and a Thermic hardener along with a kinetic and explosive resistance amplifier or rig to make a fairly even tank which will give you another 4500-5500 hit points. The key here is to use the biggest resistance modules on the biggest resistance holes.

Lazy Hardener Fit A lazier version of this fit is to use multiple invulnerability fields, and perhaps add an EM and possibly even Thermic hardener. With a 3-4 hardener setup you may run into CPU issues. You can fix that to some degree with the new CPU rig, but it won't give you much of a bonus.

CPU-saving Buffer Fit If you're less worried about tank, you can just fit a few resistance amplifiers. These also will not interfere with your mining because they do not drain capacitor. Just an EM and thermic amplifier will add close to 2000 hit points, and you'll still have more than enough CPU to fit a mining laser upgrade. You could throw an invulnerability field on top of that and boost your hit points by another 2500.

Specific Type Fit You can also defend against a specific type of attack, if you suspect it'll be used against you. Since catalysts are the cheapest and easiest way to gank hulks, you might fit a catalyst defense. Just put a thermic and kinetic hardener on, and perhaps also a thermic amplifier. This can improve your effective hit points against hybrid weapons by as much as 9000! That will also protect you from brutixes and nagas. If you play around with the fits, there are many other options as well.

Shield Booster Fit You might choose to fit a small shield booster. I will urge you not to fit a faction or deadspace shield booster because even though these are fairly cheap in comparison to your hulk, they dramatically increase the potential value of the gank. Many gankers do check your fit before deciding whether or not to attack you, and they can do this in a mining barge with a passive targeter. You'd have no idea they were on to you till it was too late. But if you do choose to smartly fit a tech 1 or tech 2 small shield booster, it can give you a pretty good boost to your active regen, 100-150 HP per second or more even, depending on your resistance fit.

Auxiliary Shield Booster The new auxiliary shield booster gives you a dramatically improved hit point regen, but at a much higher capacitor cost. If you are an observant miner like you should be, and you notice the gank before it starts, you can turn on the booster to get ready for it. This can be enough regen to remove one of your gankers almost entirely from the equation. You can have a small section of your ship's cargo dedicated to capacitor booster charges which will help power the booster. Just keep in mind that an observant ganker may choose to wait until your shield booster runs out of loaded capacitor booster charges and begins to reload. If you suspect that this is the case, do not turn your booster off. Let it eat your capacitor. Turn off your lasers if you have to. And align to warp. You should be able to get out before you run out of capacitor.

My trademark trick fit Here's a trick fit that will dramatically improve your HP against most types of attack. Fit an armor EM hardener/amplifier and a shield thermic, kinetic, and explosive hardeners or amplifiers. Or you can fit with EM and thermic on armor and with kinetic and explosive on shield. The first fit is weak to lasers and the second is weak to hybrids. Note that the hit points you see listed in your fitting screen are much lower than your actual effective values. This is because the fitting screen assumes that all damage coming in is of the lowest resistance. But this fit causes most attacks to stop short on the highest resistance. Compare the hit point values I got with a tech 2 amplifier fit on EFT:

So there you have lots of cool fitting options for your hulk. One thing that's probably bugging you is that these fits leave little or no room for mining laser upgrades. This is true, and you have to decide what is more important to you--fitting the upgrades or surviving a gank.Fitting your Mackinaw's tank is similar to the Hulk except that CPU is more limited. Orca tank is all about that damage control, it can literally double your Orca's effective hit points.

I wish I could add more but I'm out of characters.-a"The Mittani: Hated By Badpostersi'm strangely comfortable with it"-Mittens

Posted - 2012.06.10 18:03:00 -
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If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them down below or send me an EVE mail. I usually respond anywhere from within the day to within the week.-a"The Mittani: Hated By Badpostersi'm strangely comfortable with it"-Mittens

The standard hulk tank fit reaches around 30k EHP... so yea, your fits are no good.

I should have added a fit involving a medium shield extender. Forgot that one. It's a good fit, though it doesn't leave much room for anything else. Still, if EHP is the most important thing, then the shield extender is worth it. But keep in mind, a covetor can be fit with a single mining laser upgrade, and won't draw much attention from gankers. What you don't want is a hulk fit that mines at the same speed as that covetor, because then you're trying to defend the expensive thing when you could just fly something far cheaper and save yourself the hassle. Even well-tanked hulks get ganked sometimes--when someone wants you dead, there's not always much you can do about it.

Corina Jarr wrote:

I do prefer my method of mining aligned. Insta-warp for the win.

Another excellent point. It does require some getting used to, but if you make a bookmark at the right spot, you can maintain your ship at 75% velocity toward a warp point and gradually coast toward and over the asteroid as you fill your cargohold. Works best if you are warping off every time you fill your cargo.-a"The Mittani: Hated By Badpostersi'm strangely comfortable with it"-Mittens

If they can gank an orca with its already immense hitpoints, you probably can't avoid it in a hulk.

However, a lot of the Orca kills recent hulkageddon have been badly fitted Orcas that were not maximizing tank, so who knows.

They also used multiple gankers in high-dps ships. Goonswarm has no trouble mobilizing many personnel to gank, and Hulkageddon attracts pilots to group up and help each other gank. But most of the time, in most places, gankers come in ones and twos. If you learn to avoid Jita, Hulkageddon, and Goonswarm, you're much safer. Also try mining in 0.7 security space, because that's where you get decent ore with decent CONCORD response time.-a"The Mittani: Hated By Badpostersi'm strangely comfortable with it"-Mittens

Posted - 2012.06.11 01:31:00 -
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As I said, it's hard to kill a properly fit Orca, unless you have that much firepower to begin with. Then, you are screwed no matter what you fly.

Also, for any pilots with Orca's, please align them to a safe spot as you mine, then when you spot 20 ships coming into your system, you can't say unfair. It takes a butt load of alpha to kill your Orca and you should know the signs well in advance.

Posted - 2012.06.11 03:48:00 -
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I just got through playing with a medium ancillary shield booster on my merlin, and I can tell you it would be an excellent way to thwart a suicide gank, provided you were there at the controls when it happened. It'll normally take your hulk 10+ seconds to die to a suicide gank. If you saw a shady-looking ship come into your belt, aside from aligning to warp, you could also hover your mouse cursor over that shield booster. Don't activate it until they start firing, because it'll run out of cap booster charges quickly. But if your shield resists are high, it can tank an immense amount of firepower.

Here's how you might go about fitting one of these:High Slots: your favorite strip minersMedium Slots:

2x Invulnerability Field II

1x EM Ward Amplifier II

Medium Ancillary Shield Booster

Low slots:

Micro Auxiliary Power Core I

Damage Control II

Rigs:

Medium Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I

Medium Processor Overclocking Unit I

With all skills at 5, and if you overload the booster, this should get approximately 457 dps tank for up to 25 seconds. That's as much dps as my tech 1 fit catalyst can put out!

Load it with capacitor booster charge 50--even though those are the smallest it can fit, it still uses just one charge per cycle, and you still get the same shield boost for the same duration. Stay up to date on this module if you plan to use it on your hulk, because the cap booster charge phenomenon I just mentioned sounds really fishy, and might be getting fixed soon.

Lastly, don't activate the module until they start shooting you because if you start early you'l use up valuable booster charges. When they run out, it'll start using your hulk's capacitor to run. That will last about 5 cycles, and as soon as it turns off or you turn it off, it'll start reloading those cap booster charges and you won't be able to use it again for 60 seconds. Alternatively, you could avoid carrying extras in cargo--that way when you turn it off, it won't reload and will instead wait for you to activate it.

If anyone tries this out, let me know how it works!-a"The Mittani: Hated By Badpostersi'm strangely comfortable with it"-Mittens

It will cut down on mining potential, but how much extra tank can be squeezed out of a Hulk. Anyone has an EFT for additional rep tank from drones and 1 repper, either shield or armor.

Right off the top of my head I can tell you it'll be a lot. An orca can fit 3 large shield transfers or two and a mining cycle reducing booster--I don't know how well it can handle the capacitor required to run those, but I bet it could do alright. You could also just fit medium shield transfers to save capacitor.

I've used large shield transfers on a dominix, and it repairs much faster than a small shield booster. Three of them would probably give the hulk over 1000 dps tank for as long as you could sustain them.-a"The Mittani: Hated By Badpostersi'm strangely comfortable with it"-Mittens

Right off the top of my head I can tell you it'll be a lot. An orca can fit 3 large shield transfers or two and a mining cycle reducing booster--I don't know how well it can handle the capacitor required to run those, but I bet it could do alright. You could also just fit medium shield transfers to save capacitor.

However, this is easier, and will work in most cases. So I will bookmark this thread.

Your not insta warping if your just aligned(facing)and not moving. You still need to get up to 75% speed. Now if you are aligned and moving, then you must have the longest range mining lasers in the game, and please don't say your using just mining drones.

Posted - 2012.06.11 06:55:00 -
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(1) Get a "friend" - give him a nickname like "Twit II"(2) Give your friend stupid teenager personality and a free civilian gattling laz0r(3) From (2), your friend will come into the belt or grav and fire on you(4) He will be killed by CONCORD(5) CONCORD will stick around whilst you mine

(1) Get a "friend" - give him a nickname like "Twit II"(2) Give your friend stupid teenager personality and a free civilian gattling laz0r(3) From (2), your friend will come into the belt or grav and fire on you(4) He will be killed by CONCORD(5) CONCORD will stick around whilst you mine

That is all.

this is sometimes an exploit, and sometimes not. it depends on the gm handling the petition, even after it was described in detail before the gallente ice interdiction GMs are still not sure where this is, and can be cause for temp banning. CCP has not said anything that i am aware of to clear this up.Its not possible to please all the people all the time, but it sure as hell is possible to Displease all the people, most of the time.

this is sometimes an exploit, and sometimes not. it depends on the gm handling the petition, even after it was described in detail before the gallente ice interdiction GMs are still not sure where this is, and can be cause for temp banning. CCP has not said anything that i am aware of to clear this up.

I would think if CCP doesn't want players to control CONCORD response time, they would make it based on a timer and not on the presence of the ships. But CCP rarely does things the easy way.-a"The Mittani: Hated By Badpostersi'm strangely comfortable with it"-Mittens

(1) Get a "friend" - give him a nickname like "Twit II"(2) Give your friend stupid teenager personality and a free civilian gattling laz0r(3) From (2), your friend will come into the belt or grav and fire on you(4) He will be killed by CONCORD(5) CONCORD will stick around whilst you mine

That is all.

this is sometimes an exploit, and sometimes not. it depends on the gm handling the petition, even after it was described in detail before the gallente ice interdiction GMs are still not sure where this is, and can be cause for temp banning. CCP has not said anything that i am aware of to clear this up.

I would say it's less of an exploit than recycling alts for suicide gank duty in high-sec.

I would say it's less of an exploit than recycling alts for suicide gank duty in high-sec.

Witch they do and bring no consequences other than maybe ban the related account witch is not proven it's done (I doubt), and everyone knows how hard is to make profits ganking enough stuff to buy plex for said account.

Posted - 2012.06.11 12:37:00 -
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meta 4 bulkheads (local hull) and DCII is the best for a hulk. Add shield rigs and the requisite invulns and small cl-5 booster - et voila! a PITA to kill, that fat bit of tank is at the end of the attack not the start.

Posted - 2012.06.11 15:46:00 -
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Let's apply a little science and liberal dose of Pyfa. I'll assume this is using T2 strip miners. A well-skilled pilot in a basic mining Hulk will get around 9.15k EHP, 6.33k raw. That breaks down like this:

With a naturally-low armor and only two low slots, clearly armor tanking is out the window. That leaves us with shields and hull. An obvious choice is a Damage Control II. This will double your hull tank and boost everything else as well.

Hull tanking: with the DC2, you get 7.91k EHP on the hull. Adding a Reinforced Bulkhead II bumps that up to 9.89k. Your hull is now tougher than your entire hulk was when we started.

Now for the shields. We've got four mid slots to work with. The bulkheads ate a large portion of available powergrid, so hardeners are the obvious choice. Still, we only have 125 free CPU. At 44 CPU per module, T2 hardeners eat a lot. However the "limited" metas are much easier to fit, at a 10% loss in effect.

The current shield profile is this:EM: 45.3Thermic: 56.2Kinetic: 67.2Explosive: 69.4

Two adaptive invulns raise your EHP more than any two hardeners, so I started with those. After a bit of trial and error, I got a T2 invuln, a meta invuln, and and two meta amplifiers: EM and Thermic. That fits with .8% of your CPU to spare. Drop the thermic if you can't quite fit it all. Also, train your fitting skills more.

Round out the fit with field extender rigs and you get 26.1k EHP without doing anything unusual. Against pure EM, it's 25.8k (lowest possible EHP).

Mine with other people or use a pile of alts. Seriously, fleet mining has all kinds of advantages. Most importantly though, is that the more ships you have in a fleet the more you can justify having a dedicated booster. Using the same hulk from above, a boosting tengu can put your EHP up to 33k - 31.6k EM. That's far more alpha than a ganker is going to want to bring to the field. What makes it even better is that the booster often goes unnoticed, and they'll bring enough to kill a hulk based on the 26k EHP suggested by the fitting.

So unless someone wants to throw away three tornadoes per hulk, you're well-protected from alpha damage. What about a catalyst swarm? In a 0.5 system (where fleet mining really makes sense) they can bring just enough DPS to pop your hulk before Concord shows and do it rather cheaply. For that, bring ECM drones. Have your entire fleet pack them, and keep them deployed. If anyone goes GCC in the belt with you, jam them all to hell. You'll collect hilarious killmails and save your stuff.It's time to put an end to CCP's war on piracy. Fight your own battles and stop asking CCP to do it for you.

Posted - 2012.06.12 00:32:00 -
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Mining while aligned: use webs, and approach the station / gate / celestial of your choice (stations are better). Insta-warp when nervous (like when you see a bunch of Brutixes or Thrashers on dscan or even coming out of warp).

The mining ships can even web each other, but they won't be able to dock or jump for a minute after warping away.

A triple web is plenty for a Hulk (about 9 m/s), but a quad web is just as easy (7 m/s).

You can use any hauler for this, but Bestower is the largest Industrial at level 1-3 skill, and takes less than half a day for any race to train to level 1.

A Scorpion is also handy (some people prefer a 1600 mm plate to the DCU II).

this is sometimes an exploit, and sometimes not. it depends on the gm handling the petition, even after it was described in detail before the gallente ice interdiction GMs are still not sure where this is, and can be cause for temp banning. CCP has not said anything that i am aware of to clear this up.

I would think if CCP doesn't want players to control CONCORD response time, they would make it based on a timer and not on the presence of the ships. But CCP rarely does things the easy way.

Or in any way that favors anyone BUT gankers, because the devs play the game to win (no conflict of interest there, no sir) and their mostly pirates themselves.

Another excellent point. It does require some getting used to, but if you make a bookmark at the right spot, you can maintain your ship at 75% velocity toward a warp point and gradually coast toward and over the asteroid as you fill your cargohold. Works best if you are warping off every time you fill your cargo.

I just go out in a shuttle or* a mwd frigate and BM 7 points. point 0 is right on top of the asteroid I want to mine. points 1 2 3 & 4 are 225+k out in a rough square pattern surrounding the asteroid with point 4 being roughly aligned to station. top and bottom 150+k above and below the asteroid for preliminary scouting instead of blindly warping into the belt. This makes it so you can align to the next point and spend relatively less time in a vulnerable turn, and can time it so you are aligning point 4 when your hull is almost full. If im doing all the belts in system the same way they are labeled 1-1 0, for planet 1 moon 1 point 0. I do everything by right click dropdown menu, sometimes i hover over them if i anticipate trouble.

Then have a BM at 0 on station above it because warping to station lately seems to drop you outside dock range, and have 2 undocks at random intervals out past 225k. Having lived in null, bookmarks are my friend.

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